A June Apocalypse

“Wake up, Miss Edwards. Don’t you know what day it is?”

Emily opened her eyes, saw Alcmene Blotgate kneeling over her, looking down at her with those terrible gunmetal eyes of hers that were all pupil. Behind her stood Lieutenant Utisz, the front of his dark suit drenched with fresh blood. Her blood, Emily realized. He had a blade of black glass in his hands, and he was playing with it, feathering his thumb along its edge.

“Finally,” he said, watching Emily stir. “Now we can get on with this.”

They were in a small frigid room with black walls that leapt with strange shadows. There was the sound of water, like a creek somewhere deep below their feet, and there were smells—the smell of rusty water, the bitter cutting smell of wormwood and sage. Emily was naked and shivering, laid out on the cold stone floor. Her whole body was wet, and her skin tingled as if she’d just been washed with a rough sponge. There was a silver bucket next to her that contained the rusty-smelling water. Mrs. Blotgate was touching places on her naked body with some kind of oil—that was the bitter cutting smell. Emily remembered the places as those Caul had once touched, when detailing the locations he intended to drive needles into her to bleed her dry …

Her throat.

Emily reached up immediately and felt at her throat for the gaping wound. Her fingers found a knotted cord, just loose enough to allow her to breathe. Beneath it, she felt the slight rise of a fresh-seamed scar.

“Oh, we’ve taken enough of your dirty blood for the moment,” Mrs. Blotgate said, rocking back on her heels. Naked from the waist up, she wore an intricately embroidered skirt of red silk and an ostentatious necklace of feathers and gold and jade. “Much as I’d like to, I can’t let you die just yet. He’ll have a much harder time following your blood if you’re dead.”

“Mr. Stanton?” Emily said, knowing the answer already.

Mrs. Blotgate purred a confirmation. “Dreadnought.”

Emily rolled up to her feet. With an angry cry, she kicked over the bucket of rusty-smelling water; it rattled and spun across the stone floor.

“Kick all you like, there isn’t any way out,” Mrs. Blotgate said. “This is the Temple of Itztlacoliuhqui, the Goddess of Obsidian Knives.”

At the far side of the room were two tall doors made of hundreds of human bones arranged in decorative patterns. The doors were lit by torches that made the skulls seem as if they were moving. Emily did not go over to these doors, she could feel something terrible behind them, something that waited. She went the other direction instead, where the walls were tenebrous and indistinct, and she could feel even colder air rushing up from dark caverns too dark to see into.

“I wouldn’t go over there,” Lieutenant Utisz called, his voice ragged as sandpaper. “Bad things over there.”

Shivering, feeling the eyes of bad things on her back, Emily returned to the light. She rubbed the puckered stump of her wrist with her good hand. They’d even taken her prosthetic.

Mrs. Blotgate, still kneeling in the center of the room, watched Emily pace.

“Miss Edwards, do you know just exactly how hard it is to bring a man back from the dead?”

Emily did not favor her with a reply.

“You wouldn’t think it,” Mrs. Blotgate continued, “but reclaiming one pitiful human life from the oceans of eternity is a task to challenge even a goddess.”

“Maybe that’s a hint,” Emily snapped. “That there are some things even a goddess shouldn’t mess around with.”

Mrs. Blotgate went on, as if Emily hadn’t spoken.

“Every human man has thirteen unique aspects, each aspect finding its natural seat in one individual organ. When he dies, those aspects are scattered, seeking rebirth. A man is never reborn whole, Miss Edwards. He is reborn in pieces. Finding these pieces of Xiuhunel has been the Temple’s primary employment for almost four hundred years. But now, we have all of him.” She touched a golden cage that hung from the necklace around her throat. It contained a dried heart, Emily noticed with disgust. Other golden cages were spaced along the necklace, each one containing a different piece of desiccated flesh.

“I guess one of the aspects is two-timing you,” Emily noted. “You’ve only got twelve there.”

“Aren’t you a clever little saucebox?” Mrs. Blotgate hissed, annoyance finally getting the better of her. “For someone who’s already dead.”

“I’m not dead yet, you vile bitch,” Emily snarled. “And I’m clever enough to know that destroying the world, just to bring back one man, is proof that your Goddess is as dumb as a sackful of hammers.”

Mrs. Blotgate cringed, as if anticipating vengeance to rain down upon them all. When it did not, she leveled an acid gaze on Emily. “Clearly, Miss Edwards, you’ve got a lot to learn about love.”

“Not from you,” Emily said.

At that moment, the earth rumbled around them, like a great black beast growling low in its chest. The bones of the door rattled, the floor beneath them seemed to ripple. Mrs. Blotgate closed her eyes, releasing a long sigh.

“The Black Glass Goddess summons me,” she said, rising swiftly. “I am to have the honor of being her last vessel.”

Utisz made a noise of desperate protest, and was at her side in two long strides.

“You?” he murmured, grabbing her slender hands. “No … not you! Please! Her vessels always die, burned up by the force of the Goddess’ spirit …”

She trailed a hand along his cheek, silencing him.

“In the world remade, there will be power enough to preserve this body, to preserve all who are faithful to her.” She smiled. “You will join me there soon, dear boy. Do not fear, you will be remembered in her service.”

Utisz turned her palm, pressed his lips against it fervently.

“Mrs. Blotgate,” he said in a choked voice. He might have said something more, had the woman not pressed her mouth against his in a deep, attenuated kiss.

At that moment the doors of bone opened, swinging wide on hinges that creaked with a low groaning. Without looking at him again, she passed beyond them into the darkness.

Utisz watched her go, his eyes heavy with longing.

“Let me guess,” Emily said. “You were a cadet at the Erebus Academy. I hear she takes a new one every year.”

Utisz turned slowly. He smiled at Emily, a tight, strange smile. Then, with a furious motion of his clenched fist, he made the knotted cord around her throat slide tight. Emily coughed, sputtering as she fell to her knees. He came to stand over her, watching as she squirmed helplessly at his feet.

“You are nobody, and soon you will be nothing,” he rasped. She could barely hear his voice over the blood rushing in her ears. He moved his fist another fraction, making the cord around her throat tighten again. Darkness sparkled behind Emily’s eyeballs, darkness and pain, and it felt as if the cord around her throat would slice her head from her body.

“The Black Glass Goddess may be my divine mistress,” he said, “but Alcmene Blotgate is the only woman I have ever loved. The only woman who has ever loved me.”

Initiate, a voice commanded, a voice old and ancient. It reverberated in thought and in fact, like a million screams screamed all at once.

With a flick of his wrist, Utisz slackened the hold, but did not release it.

Bring her.

The Calendar Chamber seemed to have no walls, it extended so far around and above them. All around, brazen tripods belched thick dizzy smoke into the air. But the floor had captured Emily’s attention first. It was a vast circular pattern carved into the slick black stone, and in the channels of the pattern ran Black Exunge, bubbling and stinking. She walked over the channels carefully, acutely aware that her feet were bare and even the tiniest touch of Black Exunge could fatally transform her.

We have been told you understand true love.

The Goddess’ words, resonating in her mind, drew Emily’s eyes toward the center of the room, where a slender shaft of sunlight illuminated a deep, bowl-shaped pit. At the edge of the pit knelt a woman in a skirt of embroidered red silk.

Emily recognized her immediately. It was Alcmene Blotgate’s body, of course … but that was not whom Emily recognized. This thing kneeling at the edge of the pit was not Alcmene Blotgate. It was not even human. Power and sorrow rose from it, smoldering from sinuously carved shoulders. It was the Goddess of Obsidian Knives.

Emily squinted through the drifting smoke, looking into the pit. There, protruding from the pit’s earthen sides was the thick gnarled root through which Zeno’s spirit had escaped. And there was the mound of flesh that she recognized from her Cassandras. The thing Zeno had been thrown onto to die. The thing that could transmute Black Exunge into chrysohaeme—the engine of apocalypse. A pile of slick, healthy flesh in her vision, now it was gray and sickly, like a pile of badly cured leather.

It was not always as you see it now, the Goddess said. Before we grew it, and loved it, and nurtured it, it was very small. A mere cluster of cells on the tip of a sharp knife, slid between the ribs of a traitor.

… A black blade, sliding between Stanton’s ribs, Emily remembered.

A little piece of his liver. The organ that gives a burned Warlock his most unique abilities. The ability to channel chrysohaeme—and the ability to transmute Exunge. We did not need his service. We did not need his soul. We needed only this.

“Then that’s the thirteenth organ,” Emily said. “The thirteenth piece of Xiuhunel.”

It is the most important piece. The one we will use to reunite all the others.

“You’re not going to reunite anything,” Emily said with relish. “Zeno has broken it. He’s broken your engine of apocalypse and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The Goddess rose in a dark blur, teeth flashing white behind the sneering mask with its huge curving fangs of yellow ivory. She was huge, her edges shimmering and indistinct.

Credomancers, she growled, the low resonance of her voice making the pile of leathery flesh behind her shudder. Always trying to believe inconvenient things into being untrue.

“I’m not a credomancer,” Emily said, her voice trembling despite her best efforts to control it. “I know what the truth is.”

Indeed. Emily felt the Goddess trying to push into her mind, to explore her soft places. You are the vessel of Ososolyeh. You see the truth through her eyes.

“I see that your Liver is dying,” Emily said. “That is all the truth I need.”

But it is not all the truth there is. It is gravely injured, but it can be healed. It can be healed by the blood of the man from whom it was taken. The blood of my beloved consort’s last rebirth. The blood of the Thirteenth Incarnation.

At that moment, a voice rang through the great Calendar Chamber.

“Itztlacoliuhqui, Misery of Humankind, Goddess of Black Glass. Let me enter!” Stanton’s voice echoed through the Calendar Chamber, resonating off the cold vitreous walls. “I have come to destroy you.”